medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
no, first he wrote the medium is the message, then he wrote a short
book with the pun you cite. so we're both right.
r
On Jan 23, 2005, at 4:42 PM, Joann McNamara wrote:
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
> culture
> I simply can't resist interjecting a little pedantry into this lofty
> discussion. Marshall McLuhan wrote The Medium is the Massage----not
> the "message."
>
> Jo Ann McNamara
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: richard landes
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 1:43 PM
> Subject: Re: [M-R] Method and ugliness
>
>
> On Jan 23, 2005, at 12:27 PM, Jim Bugslag wrote:
>
>
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and
> culture
>
>
> okay, i'll bite; what do you mean by foucauldian? what's the fence i
> can't sit on?
>
> Richard,
> Although somewhat unintended, it appears we have a discussion on our
> hands. It
> might even turn into a thread! By Foucauldian, I was referring to
> Michel Foucault's
> "archeology" of knowledge, principally enunciated in his book, The
> Order of Things,
> in which he equates knowledge and power on a theoretical level.
>
> here's part of what i have trouble with. related? of course. equated?
> why? what does that mean?
>
>
> I can hardly
> pretend to be an expert on Foucault, but I think that it is important
> to make such
> connections explicit, particularly for the Middle Ages, when what
> written sources that
> we have were virtually all written by a clerical elite, whose
> activities, first in creating
> them and subsequently in archiving them, served their own hegemonic
> ends.
>
> agreed. one of my main points about apocalyptic discourse (the End --
> however conceived -- is nigh) is that since it's always wrong (End
> still not here), while churchmen (and women) may have waxed
> apocalyptic, the archivists and copyists do the clean-up job on what
> they said. hence augustine rules the documentary world (a real
> hegemonic discourse about Revelation) in a way that i doubt he ruled
> the oral world.
>
> my problem with hegemonic discourse as i most often see it invoked, is
> that as far as i can make out there is no unitary hegemonic end that
> unites all these clerical voices. granted there are some that carry
> particularly great weight -- eg the welfare of the church -- but even
> that is up for grabs at various points of reform when what is "good
> for the church" changes tack. this is where the equation of power and
> knowledge becomes problematic. indeed, what is so striking about
> medieval western europe is how contentious the discourse was, and how
> often "knowledge" subverted various forms of power. when you can't see
> that happening (eg in the various phases of the peace of god) and
> insist that the discourse is a hegemonic one from the start (ie the
> bishops "peace", or the "seigneurial" peace) then i think you miss
> critical nodes of transformative rather than hegemonic discourse.
>
>
> Practices and ideas that do not conform to their interests only rarely
> get mentioned
> and at that, are mentioned only in a negative or proscriptive sense
> (e.g. in
> inquisition records, when they were being prosecuted in an attempt to
> stamp them
> out).
>
> precisely. and we need to look for the vestiges of what is being
> repressed and ask ourselves what role these discourses played in oral
> culture (ie the world where, among other things, political decisions
> are made), which in most cases may differ radically from the
> impression given by written sources.
>
>
> As Marshall McLuhan put it back in the 60s, "the medium *is* the
> message".
>
> and that was one of McLuhan's problems -- he had a brilliant insight:
> "the medium *is* *a* message, and he packaged it (to illustrate the
> point) as *the* message. medium is incredibly important and much
> underestimated by scholars who assume literacy and therefore identify
> most easily with the literate (ie the clergy who produce their
> documents). but so is content.
>
>
> That is why, I believe, the subsequent discussion about "urban
> legends" has taken
> the tone it has: the very "medium" represents social and ideological
> interests that
> not everyone shares.
>
> what medium? urban legends? or written documentation.
>
>
> In historical terms, that makes for something of a
> methodological quagmire (although one that might be theorized down to a
> minimum, if there were an adequate effort at it).
>
> you mean becoming aware of the problem may help us deal with it? i'm
> in favor. i'm just not sure that foucault, despite his brilliance, is
> the best theoretical handle.
>
>
> That is why I mentioned
> ethnography, which takes a very different approach to "legends", which
> it takes for
> granted represents *somebody*'s social interests and tries to analyse
> them in order
> to see how they fit into broader social patterns and structures.
>
> one of the things i've noticed is that people can believe things that
> are not in their interests, and that to analyze things in this
> functional way (e.g., the documentary hypothesis with the Bible) is
> only partly useful, and often misleading. it leads to a kind of venal
> marxism where everyone is corrupt and only says things to serve
> personal or corporate interests understood in the basest (zeero-sum)
> terms. i think that while that is going on, there's more as well.
>
>
> You began this discussion (unintentionally) by clearly distinguishing
> "urban
> legends" from "sources". Yet, you seem, as well, to be implying that
> you have
> somehow been making use of "oral sources" in your work. From where I'm
> sitting,
> that is sitting on both sides of the same fence.
>
> when i heard it was an urban legend, i assumed that meant that the
> story of a beguine refused entry for being beautiful and scarring her
> face to get in was not to be found in the medieval sources, but in
> modern, uinfootnoted discourse (ie if i cd remember where i'd read it,
> i'd find it didn't have a footnote). when i asked if it were an urban
> legend, i meant, "do we have a narrative from the 13th? cn that tells
> this tale -- whether it actually happened or not (another level of
> "urban legend"). we may have confused levels of urban legend here.
>
> r (from blizzard-swept boston)
>
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